The present disclosure relates generally to the field of processors, and more particularly to microprocessor architecture design.
Some microprocessor architectures support individual instructions that require loading a pointer from memory and manipulating the loaded data. One such example involves a condensed pointer in which a known boundary is considered, and therefore the pointer is kept in memory without its least significant zeros. After loading the pointer, it is left-shifted to restore the actual address. Thus, where a 32-bit pointer is used in a 64-bit processor, 64 bits are loaded from cache memory, whereupon the most significant 32 bits are zeroed to produce a 32-bit pointer.